"Charity, charity, if you hope for mercy! Charity! Take pity on me! Take pity on me!"
A monomere, black and flat-nosed as a mulatto, with a long leonine mane, picked up the dust in the curls of his hair, then shook his head, enveloping himself in a cloud. A woman afflicted with hernia, of no age, having no longer a human face, squatted on a post, raised her apron to show her hernia, enormous and yellowish like a bladder full of suet. Seated on the ground, a man afflicted with elephantiasis pointed with his finger to his leg, massive as the trunk of an oak, covered with warts and yellow crusts, dotted with black or hardened spots, so voluminous that one would have said it did not belong to him. A blind man, on his knees, his hands stretched towards heaven in the attitude of an ecstatic, had under his high and bald brow two little blood-stained holes. Others and still others showed themselves in the dazzling glare of the sun, as far as the view could carry. All the great hillside was infested by them without an interval. Their supplications continued uninterruptedly, rising and falling in chorus, in discord, with a thousand accents. The vast extent of the solitary country, the deserted and silent sky, the hallucinating reverberation of the fiery road, the immobility of the vegetable forms—all these environments rendered the hour tragic, evoked the biblical image of a road of desolation conducting to the gates of a cursed city.
"Let's go! Let's go back! Please, George, let's go back!" repeated Hippolyte, with a shudder of horror, dominated by the superstitious idea of a divine punishment, fearing other spectacles and more atrocious ones, under this burning and empty sky in which there began to be heard a metallic rumbling.
"But where can we go? Where shall we go?"
"No matter where. No matter where. Let us go back over there, near the sea. We'll wait there until it's time to leave. Please!"
The fast, the torture of thirst, the hot, oppressive atmosphere, had increased in both their uneasiness of mind.
"Do you see? Do you see?" she cried, as if in front of a supernatural apparition. "Do you see? Will it then never end?"
In the light, the glaring and implacable light, advanced towards them a band of tattered men and women, and in front of the band marched a sort of crier who vociferated while agitating a copper tray. These men and women bore upon their shoulders a trestle covered with a mattress on which lay an invalid of cadaverous appearance, a yellowish-looking creature, thin as a skeleton, tightly wrapped in bands of cloth like a mummy, the feet bare. And the crier—an olive-colored and serpentine man with the eyes of a madman—pointed to the dying woman, and related in a high key that this woman, who had been ill from hemorrhage for years, had obtained the miracle from the Virgin at the very dawn of that day, and he begged for alms so that, cured of her disease, she could gain fresh blood. And he shook the copper tray, on which tinkled a few coins.
"The Madonna has performed the miracle! The miracle! The miracle! Charity! In the name of the Very Holy and the Very Merciful Mary, charity!"
The men, the women, all together, contracted their faces as if about to weep. And the invalid, with a vague gesture, slightly raised her bony hands, the fingers of which moved as if to seize something in the air; while her bare feet, as yellow as her hands and face, shiny at the ankles, had the rigidity of death. And all that was exposed in the glaring and implacable light—near, near, always nearer.